(Masood Mortazavi)

Friday Mar 13, 2009

Janice has also written a very good summary of the interview. In conducting the interview, Janice gave me an opportunity to go over some of my own thinking in the subject matters we considered together. I'm truly grateful to her for turning this into a productive conversation that goes well beyond the expected questions. Thank you Janice.

Monday Dec 18, 2006

In cultured societies1, the state secures personal property against
wanton takeover. Such protection encourages personal investment in productive social activity.

In a sense, private property becomes, and indeed is, sacred.

Nowhere
is this more clear than the severe, albeit varying punishment vetted
against thieves in various cultures and societies throughout history.

For example, consider the law in the U.S. that called for the execution of a man who stole the horse of another.
Presumably, stealing a horse could be tantamount to stealing another's
livelihood if not his or her life. As another example, if some score
of conditions hold, a thief of a personal property might lose a
limb--starting with a piece of a finger--according to the sharia
law. One of those score of hard-to-meet conditions that must exist for
this particular law to apply involves a lack of a survival need to
steal. So, the punishment may apply to a Wall Street magnet who has
provenly and intentionally stolen from an old lady's pension or some
orphans' trust, wrecking their lives as a consequence, but will not
apply to a hungry beggar who takes an apple.

Furthermore, and
beyond the proofs in stipulated punishments, we have the proof in
taboos against taking what belongs to others. These taboos run deep.
For example, consider the emphasis, in both Jewish and Islamic law,
regarding payment of debt as a religious obligation. Most reasonable
people experience the relevant acculturation and live by these taboos
and commendations.

Without the protection of private
property, no one can be expected to give of his own or contribute
anything for she or he will receive nothing of worth in return. There
would be no incentive to contribute anything of worth without the
protection of private property and rights in what is of worth. The
history of the artificial beliefs in the sanctity of communal property
extending to all things worth owning makes it quite clear that when
incentives of private ownership disappear, people stop contributing
willingly.

However, all protection of private and personal
"property" has come at a price. States levy taxes on assets presumably
to compensate themselves for cost of securing the conditions for
ownership of such assets. The owners pay taxes and return something to
the society that harbored their ownership rights. There are similar
limits in other cases.

While IP and copyrights have been
treated by some as private property, the protections granted to them
had a different purpose. It was not an eternal protection but simply a
safeguard for a limited time in order to grant the creative forces some
security so that they may achieve and earn a return on the novelty they
had created. Indefinite or long-term protection would create other
problems such as
slow propagation of novel ideas and innovations, not to mention the
cost of enforcing such "rights." However, there were limits imposed on
the duration of such protection in order to return the ideas to the mix
of the community that had helped foster them.

When
a society pays more for securing what only needs limited protection, it
increases its cumulative transaction costs at a time when better,
lower-cost, alternatives exist for safeguarding what needs protecting.
(This forumla also holds with aggressive wars as a means to provide
"security" or with dubious prisons and gulags as a means to provide "justice." These techniques remind us of the analogy of a hammer used to kill a fly. Indeed, they are far worse.)

To
the extent creative commons get a chance to grow beyond a certain
threshold, we are in a position to see a more free culture. Cultural
production means creating new cultural products against and upon what
history has handed to us. To the extent that history can be
frozen in a particular era by some few owners of its cultural products,
we stand to suffer because we lose our flexibility as a cultured
community to respond to the changes that go on around us.

Notes

1. The phrase "cultured societies" reads like an oxymoron. No society can exist in the long run without a culture to sustain it. Perhaps, I should have said in "Sustainable societies". Then again, we aree dealing with a bit of a tautology here. Without culture a society cannot be sustained, and no society is sustainable without culture.